G4 vs. Athlon Review

heatseeka writes "There is a great article at Ars Technica comparing the Motorola G4 and the AMD Athlon. They discuss every detail of the design of the CPU's, and give credit where credit is due. " Hannibal does a great job dissecting the different chips, as well as explaining the background behind each chip.

Comments

Wrong...

[MacBoy]

To quote from the article:

Since the K7's FPU handles vector operations, it's not always totally free to do fp ops like the G4's FPU is. But considering that vector and regular fp calculations aren't normally mixed, the K7's fp performance should exceed that of the 7400 under most circumstances...

The G4's vector unit (AlticVec) is way more complex than the K7's. It can do Floating Point operations - four SP (single precision) or two DP (double prec) in fact. In combination with the FPU of the G4 (which can do one SP or DP FP op), the G4 can do no fewer than five SP FP ops or three DP FP ops per cycle. Any application that does FP ops and is compiled on an AtliVec enabled compiler (such as Codewarrior or Mototrola's) will take advantage of this superior capability. AltiVec's 32, 128 bit-wide vector registers and it's 155 vector instructions make it a formidable number-cruncher.

By Favourite bar graph

[Pope]

is here

It shows power consumption of the major chips in use. Note where the PPC chips are! :)
Enjoy.


Pope